


Magic In England? Two Napoleonic-Era Men And An Unorthodox Theory

by ErnieThePyle



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 13:31:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5930254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnieThePyle/pseuds/ErnieThePyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A journalist writes about an unusual historical theory from Napoleonic era England. Could magic have been real?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic In England? Two Napoleonic-Era Men And An Unorthodox Theory

_By Evelyn S._

Dr. Charlie Sims has an unusual theory.

“Two-hundred years ago, there was magic in England.”

Did I mention his theory was an unusual one?

Sims is an historian, one not typically associated with conspiracy theories. He’s been published in peer-reviewed journals, lectured at three Ivy League institutions and, so he tells me, has been given very nice pens by very influential minds. That is to say, in all seriousness, that Dr. Charlie Sims isn’t usually crazy. But there it is again.

“Magic, the real hocus-pocus. No smoke and mirrors, unless you mean walking through one pane of glass and emerging from another 100 miles away,” Sims says in his small office at Pennsylvania State University. Behind him are rows of books jutting in awkward angles around his degrees from Oxford and Princeton, along with his honorary titles and certificates, including ones attesting to membership granted to him in two of the most prestigious academic historical societies on either side of the Atlantic. 

In front of Sims: a book with a picture of a raven engraved into its weathered cover that rests on a special foil surface he brought out just for the tome. 

Sims doesn’t touch the book often. When it is handled, it’s only with gloves and only with the kind of delicacy you’d imagine of a nuclear bomb. Every tool that comes into contact with the book is sterilized before and after. Every surface it rests on is covered in that same friction-less foil. And every single night this one thick, faded book gets locked in a safe for which Sims produces a $5,000 receipt and a lifetime guarantee that no one and no thing will ever breach its innards without permission. 

The Book of the Raven King reads the scrawled, hand-engraved words on the spine. 

Sims calls the book “the most important in human history.” His research, while still far from complete, focuses on piecing together the histories that flow in and around this tome. The picture is still largely incomplete but Sims says that only pushes him to fill it in more. 

Within the pages of The Book of the Raven King are a lot of names, but the ones Sims speaks of most commonly are Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. When he does mention them, it is always in covetous whispers, awe etched into his voice. 

History has recorded Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as a pair of avant-garde scholars and students of the occult. But Sims calls them something else entirely.

“These men brought magic back to England,” he says. And not only did they apparently bring it forth to England, according to Sims, but they brought it back. As in it had been there before and then left, or as Sims tells it, been abandoned by a man 300 years Norrell and Strange’s predecessor: John Uskglass, the man referred to as the Raven King so emblazoned on the book. 

Sims never refers to Uskglass by that name. As he explains it, there’s serious historical debate as to whether or not it was his real moniker at all. Sims, and the few historians who are beginning to look into the same English histories, agree on just one name for the man. 

Historians like Harvard Ph.D. student Qin Liung simply call Uskglass the Raven King. 

“Great name isn’t it?” Liung told me in a phone interview. While Sims has been focusing on Norrell and Strange, she’s devoted her occult history studies to the Raven King, a man she describes as an ethereal entity who must be tracked by reading around the histories rather than directly into the texts. 

Solid evidence of the Raven King’s existence is scarce but Liung and Sims are convinced some close facsimile of him existed, and much the rest of the historical world has at least started to entertain the theory. Liung in fact is basing her dissertation on the man and Harvard has so far been willing to fund her research. 

As Liung tells it, the Raven King ruled over the whole of the Isle of Britain with a magical iron fist across most of the 1400s. Tree limbs spindled at his wish, rivers raged, skies bled and men cowered at an overlord who could embed them in a painting or transfigure their very souls. And then one day the man called the Raven King left England, and with him went the magic, returning the island country to what you and I would call normal.

Three hundred years later however, Sims says that Norrell and Strange would have called it boring. 

“Norrell spent a lifetime scouring every book in every corner of the English-speaking world he could get his hands on,” Sims says. “If it purportedly spoke of magic or the occult, Norrell grabbed it and hoarded it in his home built on the exact spot where the Raven King was believed to have lived.” 

Norrell’s library, according to Sims, was legendary. But few ever saw the books there. Norrell, apparently, was not just greedy for knowledge but covetous. He lived an obscure, barely noticed life of collecting and devouring his books until one day in 1807 when Norrell stepped from the shadows.

The man, Sims says, had something of a flair for the dramatic, or at least the grandiose. He purportedly gathered the occult scholars of the city of York together and offered them a deal: sign a contract stipulating that you will never again study the occult (an obsessive hobby for this particular club) if I’m able to prove magic is more than just theoretical and that it can be practiced beyond the pages of a book. If I fail, I will be the one taking a vow never to practice the arcane ever again. 

All but one of the men signed the document, only to face what Sims describes as perhaps the biggest shock of the 19th century. Fifty statues in the oldest, most ornate cathedral in York suddenly came alive. They talked. They moved. They scared and scarred and marked Mr. Norrell as the first live, practicing magician in England in 300 years. 

The stunt drew notice fast and hard. Norrell packed up from York and moved to a house in London where he started working his way through the strata of British society, his reputation and the mystery that still surrounded it opening doors no mere scholar should have been able to get past. 

At first however and much to his frustration, the majority of attention Norrell received, the most interest, was for party favors, Sims says. He spent weeks trying to get an audience with someone important, Sims says, a minister, a high-level bureaucrat, the king of England himself. None would see the funny little man and the little parlor tricks. Until someone died, that is. The fiancé of a high-ranking Member of Parliament named Walter Pole, Lady Emma Wintertown, died at the age of 19 after a sudden illness. 

In a normal historical narrative, Lady Wintertown’s death would be the end of it. Perhaps her husband would have moved on, married someone new, met Norell through intersecting social circles. But this in an historical theory based around the existence of magic. And Norrell’s magical ambitions were grand. Grand enough to purportedly summon a fairie lorde from another realm and entreat him to bring Lady Pole back to life. Yes, I just wrote fairie lorde and did so with most of a straight face. Bear with me here. 

Based on Sims’ account, an account that’s drawing increasing scholarly interest and for which he just received a $50,000 grant from Cambridge’s history department for further study, resurrecting Lady Pole is exactly what Norrell purportedly did. 

The deal with the fairie lorde, to bring the eventual Lady Pole back to life apparently in exchange for a piece of her soul, would go unknown for years. But suddenly, Norrell was the man who could bring back the dead, the man invited to speak to the Houses of Parliament and recruited to begin a magical military campaign comprised largely of deception and oiling the war machine against Britain’s great rival, Napoleon-controlled France.

Norrell’s first large-scale trick, according to Sims, was a giant, watery armada summoned from the rain, a blockade of ships that distracted the French navy long enough to sneak groups of spies to mainland France with nary a warship the wiser. The trick was bold, perhaps Norrell’s most clever, Sims says. 

But it’s not Norrell that Sims and fellow Penn State military history expert Benjamin Hirn really talk about when it comes to fighting Napoleon’s armies with a bag of magical tricks. That distinction falls to Strange, a wealthy landowner with apparently none of the scholarly background of Norrell. But Strange purportedly made up for the more minimal magical education with an improvisational sort of magic he made up as he went along. 

Sims speaks halfheartedly of a story of Strange meeting a bizarre vagabond found under a hedge who gave him a book of magic. Hirn says it’s not clear where Strange learned his first few spells. But he’s no less convinced of Strange’s existence, or that his skills landed him a coveted spot as Norrell’s first and only pupil, a relationship that was still relatively fresh when King and Country called for the first Napoleonic war. Norrell stayed behind. Strange however became the Duke of Wellington’s personal war-magician. 

“The story goes that Wellington didn’t have much use for Strange at first,” Hirn said in an interview. “But then he brought a few enemy soldiers back from the dead.”

This resurrection, according to Hirn, who’s spent most of his professional career looking at unorthodox military strategies, was not facilitated by a fairie lorde. And yes, continuing to write that with a straight face is as difficult as it sounds. But Hirn, who’s written widely published books about Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Napoleon himself, says with conviction and not a hint of irony in his voice that the resurrected enemy soldiers more closely resembled reanimated corpses than the dead made live and whole. 

“The first thing the soldiers’ letters home about it mention, always, is the smell,” Hirn said. Hirn has managed to track down more than 20 soldiers who made what he says are virtually identical claims in letters home. Those letters claim Strange resurrected several fallen soldiers in an effort to interrogate them: foul-smelling and zombie-like creatures who ambled around much as you might picture a ghost. Nor does Hirn simply think the soldiers were lying or crazy. 

“Nothing else was unusual in those letters,” Hirn said. He has correspondence from before the time the soldiers met Strange, where they spoke only of the mundane; pining for home, complaining about the food, inquiring about lovers and children. Then Strange showed up in the letters and the fantastical came with him. 

Aside from the dead men made closer to living, what really piqued Wellington’s interest, as Hirn tells it, is when Strange moved his first city.

Moved?

“I got a map, dated 1798, showing a small Spanish river about 20 miles north of the city of Pamplona,” Hirn said. “Twenty years later, the river hasn’t moved but a new map shows the town as 10 miles closer.”

Hirn is convinced the first map isn’t a simple mistake. He’s got others, he says, and letter correspondence previously thought to be Wellington jokingly speaking of needing towns and rivers moved out of his army’s path.

“No joke. Strange moved them where they militarily needed to go,” Hirn says. 

The wartime experiences seem to have deeply shaped Strange, according to Hirn, with frequent service on the front-most lines that spanned virtually the entire length of both Napoleonic Wars. 

Sims, for his part, thinks it was the time abroad that planted the first wedges between Strange and Norrell, wedges that would ultimately grow into a full-blown rivalry. 

“Strange kept asking for help, but never got any from Norell,” Sims said. 

“The bigger rift was in Strange really experimenting more with magic and learning it wasn’t limited to the more practical applications that Norell had prescribed. He found it wasn’t nearly as strict as Norell had preached but when Strange pushed to expand the boundaries of magical knowledge, Norell pushed back. Hard.”

Sims believes Norell may have been threatened by Strange’s experimentation. Or perhaps he was worried about the consequences to the physical world of pushing the envelope.

Whatever sparked the rivalry, it escalated rapidly to the point of sabotage, according to Sims. 

When Strange openly criticized a book Norrell had written, all bets were off and Norrell sought to ensure that his former pupil’s own tome never saw the light. How’d he do that, precisely? 

“I have more than a dozen lawsuits filed against either Norrell, Strange, or both of them by respected Britons, including nobility, alleging they bought Strange’s book only for it to simply disappear into thin air,” Sims says.

The true nail in the coffin of Strange and Norrell’s relationship, as Sims tells it, was the death of Strange’s wife, Arabella. The two had wed around the time he first started using magic and by all accounts there’s was a happy and devoted marriage. But on a cold, wintry day, Arabella Strange vanished from their home only to reappears days later, deranged and frail. She died soon after.

Arabella’s death, according to Sims, broke her husband. Ever the magician, he worked frantically to bring her back. But he failed. And Norrell apparently refused to help. So Strange went abroad, searching through continental Europe for a way to resurrect his love, all while going slowly insane. 

Sims produces letters from those who met Strange on his travels, letters that as the months went by describe an ever-more disheveled and desperate man. 

“This one letter breaks my heart: ‘I don’t believe Strange’s wardrobe has left his shoulders in days. His hair is everywhere, his eyes more so. How I understand his loss, but unlike those who’ve accepted the mortal coil, his is a spirit convinced we are not so bound, but unable to prove it.’”

As Strange descended into madness, so does the narrative. It more or less concludes with Strange and Norell disappearing, as such men are wont to do it seems. But not without a big bang, at least according to news accounts out of Venice and one note from the Houses of Parliament that was buried for two hundred years until Sims unearthed it. 

The accounts tell of Strange’s madness and a giant, swirling tower of pure black malevolence that sprang up over the city of Venice. And then every mirror in England broke. At once. The rules of nature started going haywire. Strange’s magical fingerprints were everywhere, apparently testing the furthest bounds of his prowess and ensuring everyone in the world knew he was no longer abiding by Norell’s “respectable” English magic. 

“None of the documents I’ve found so far really hint at exactly what was happening,” Sims says.

Strange apparently sent messages to England, announcing among other things Norell’s black deal with the fairie lorde. Sims says he continues to look for those messages but all he’s managed to find are a few references to them, not the real thing. 

Strange, it seems, was angry at Norell for sabotaging his book, for the deal with the fairie lorde, for everything else. So he headed back to England and brought the black tower with him. It landed on Norell’s house. According to Sims, neighbors described it standing there for hours until it vanished into the sky, taking the home and apparently, Norell and Strange with it. 

And yet that’s still not quite the end of the story. 

Remember Arabella Strange, the wife of Jonathan and the one whose death spurred her husband to madness and seeming magical rebellion? She came back. Letters bearing her distinct hand appear on Sims’ desk, with dates precisely coinciding with before and after her disappearance, and Sims says he’s had three different experts examine the handwriting. Every single one belongs to the same person he says, one Arabella Strange. 

After her husband’s death, Arabella’s letters refer to time spent with the very York men Norell had coaxed into signing away their rights to magic. The deal apparently broke with their rival’s disappearance and the men quickly threw themselves back into magic, apparently trying to resurrect the disappeared pair. Sims says there are rumors that indicate they might have even succeeded. 

Of more hard fact is that it was these very men who ultimately wrote the Raven King’s book on Sims’ desk, the one he continues to pour through page by careful page as the central crux of his research, into magic in England, into Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. 

_Evelyn Segundas is a freelancer specializing in covering strange academic and historical theories. The love of the obtuse, as she tells it, has been passed down through her family from generation to generation, starting with an occult scholar from York, England named Jonathan Segundas._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a trained journalist, so sometimes when I want to tell stories this is how I do it.


End file.
